Author: Allen Bingham

I am a follower of Jesus, husband, father, and pastor of Haymount United Methodist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, USA.

Seth Godin reminds us to think through what the customer wants before presenting ideas. True for preachers as well (via Seth’s blog)

The most effective way to sell the execution of an idea is to describe the use case first. And before you can do that, you need to have both the trust of your client and enough information to figure out what would delight them.

Then, describe what a great solution would do. “If we could use 10,000 square feet of space to profitably service 100 customers an hour…” or “If we built a website that could convert x percent of …” or “If we could blend a wine that would appeal to this type of diner…”

After the use case is agreed on, then feel free to share your sketches, brainstorms and mockups. At that point, the only question is, “does this execution support the use case we agreed on?”

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Samuel Chand’s CRACKING YOUR CHURCH’S CULTURE CODE reminds us of what we already know (and often forget) about organizations

One of my mentors encouraged me to launch my ministry in every church with a study of John’s letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor. I baulked at opening ministry with I percieved as a can of worms and then something hit me. These letters were written to the angels of the seven churches! Intuitively I knew that every organization I had worked with had a sense, an ethos, that was often hard to get a handle on and yet crucial to its function (or dysfunction!). My mentor was inviting me to pay attention to that ethos as I envisioned ministry in a new setting.

Samuel Chand’s recent book, Cracking Your Church’s Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration (Jossey-Bass, 2011), has brought greater clarity to my intuitive hunches about a church’s ethos. Chand quickly challenges the reader to understand that culture is king when it comes to leading an organization. Your leadership has less sway than the inspiring or toxic culture that you swim in within your church. The unnoticed and unexamined cultural code will rise up to challenge every change needed by the organization, so pay attention to Chand’s discerning exercises for revealing and changing the code for multiplied benefits. He uses the acronym CULTURE (control, undersanding, leadership, trust, unafraid, responsive, and execution) to help the reader think broadly about the cultural ethos of their organization.

The heart of the book centers on the chapters “Vocabulary Defines Culture” and “Change Starts with Me.” Our vocabulary shapes the environment which we lead. If we describe everything in negative terms, then we find negative results. I have learned that the opposite is true as well. Chand helped me understand that I have to examine every piece and source of communication for the words that hold an organization from realizing its potential. The culture code is strong and must be addressed on multiple fronts honest communication, deep listening, naming the unknown in “some people say,” and offering real affirmations as the church moves forward. The challenging reminder that I can only change myself is braced by a helpful section on how to leave gracefully when your gifts and strengths are not aligned with that of the organization’s cultural code. This section of the book is pure gold and I wish I had read it sooner!

Cracking Your Church’s Culture Code should be required reading for every pastor. And pastors should pass their copy on to other leaders in their congregations. Every community, business, enterprise, and organization has a “culture code” and not paying attention to the code inevitably leads to ruin.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received the above book for free in the hope that I would mention it on my blog. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

David Platt’s RADICAL … a call to radical obedience to God and a rejection of the American Dream. You’ve been warned!

Sometimes you just want to sit in your rocking chair and sometimes God put someone in your path to rock your world. Recently, some young adults talked with me about a study that was rocking their world based on David Platt’s book RADICAL: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. I acquired a copy to check out their excitement and nearly fell out of my Kennedy rocker.

Each of the opening chapters of RADICAL begin with a powerful story out of Platt’s experiences among populations under severe persecution. He reflects on the contrast between their hunger for God’s word and the typical person sitting and soaking in the pews of American churches. Platt lays it on the line as he described a weekend visit with a church that spent more time celebrating their American patriotism and promising “we will continue to send you a check so that we don’t have to go there ourselves” (63). A page later Platt sums up his frustration with this bold claim: “God has created each of us to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, and I propose that anything less than radical devotion to this purpose in unbiblical Christianity” (65).

This unbiblical Christianity, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is characterized by “assigning the obligations of Christianity to a few while keeping the privileges of Christianity of us all” with a dismissive “I’m not called” from the pews (73, emphasis in original). The privilege of “enjoying God’s grace” must be coupled with the obligation to “extend God’s glory” and anything less is what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. The balance of RADICAL reminds us of our grounding as Christians and posits an urgency for fulfilling the great commandment to carry the message of God’s love made known in Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth.

Platt closes RADICAL with a challenging experiment.  For one year would we commit ourselves to: praying for the entire world, read through the entire Word, sacrifice our money for a specific purpose, spend a week in another context, and commit ourselves to being part of a multiplying community of faith. Platt labels this radical obedience and the claim made on our lives by Jesus demands singular devotion to this mission.

I admit to approaching the book with some skepticism. Over the last two decades I purchased numerous books that promised to change my thinking about the church, grow my spiritual leadership, or show how my theology was out of sync. Most of the time those books made it to the used book store within weeks. By the time my copy of RADICAL makes it to the used book store I hope it will have passed through numerous hands … buy this book, settle into your rocker, and be prepared to bolt out of it into a RADICAL life devoted to God’s soon-coming kingdom.

I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.

One more time I have to unlearn a three decade old habit! Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it. (via Slate Magazine)

Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he’d become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails “creepy,” “lovesick,” and “stalkery”; I’d add overwrought, self-important, and dorky. (“Our intimacy seems like the memory of a strange dream to me,” went a typical line.) Still, given all we’ve heard about Assange’s puffed-up personality, the substance of his e-mail was pretty unsurprising. What really surprised me was his typography.

p>Here’s a fellow who’s been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that’s revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

via slate.com